FAQ Roundup: Introductory material

Updated 03May07

Wanting to join in a discussion with feminists on a blog or other online forum? Need more information? It's a good idea to start with one or both of these two posts, depending on how you came here:

• I asked some feminists a question, and instead of answering they sent me here. Why?
• How to Use This Blog.

Below are the FAQs thus far (this page will be regularly updated on approximately a weekly basis). Qs in small font are in progress but not yet posted. If your question is not addressed in the FAQs below, please check the Open Suggestions Thread to see whether someone else has suggested the same question and/or provided a useful link to an article addressing that question.

Each of the FAQ posts below contain links to other material, especially other blog-posts, from other authors online. The comments threads provide links to further reading supplied by the readers of this blog.

There is some necessary repetition in some of the FAQs, because not everybody is going to read every Q, so material needs to be placed in more than one post to effectively cover various issues.

NB: The FAQs attempt to be descriptive from a reasonably neutral position. There are other posts on this blog which are not FAQs which are intended as general feminist resources and op-eds: these posts are not intended to be neutral documents.

Absolute basics:

• What is feminism?
• What do feminists want?
• Does feminism matter?
• Isn't feminism just "victim" politics?
• Why do some people talk of "feminisms"?
• Can men be feminists?
• What can feminism do for me?
• What can I do for feminism?
• What do you mean by "Not my Nigel"? (feminist abbreviations/jargon)
  

Specific Issues:

• Why are there so many fights between feminists?
• Why do you feminists hate men?
• What is male privilege?
• What is the "Gender Gap"?
• What’s wrong with suggesting that women take precautions to prevent being raped?
• Isn't "the Patriarchy" just some conspiracy theory?
• What do feminists mean by "reproductive freedom"?
• Aren't you all just a bunch of "feminazis"?

Clarifying Concepts:

• What is "sexual objectification"?
• What is the "male gaze"?
• I've got nothing against equal rights for women, but we've got that, so isn't feminism nowadays just going too far ? (aka Why do we still need feminism?)
• Why "feminism" and not just "humanism"? or "equalism"? Isn't "feminism" exclusionary?
• Why are you concentrating so hard on "X" when "Y" is so much more important?
• But men and women are born different! Isn't that obvious?
• How can Feminity be "socially constructed"?
• Feminists just hate heterosexual sex
  

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